I don't know what's been going on with the Caravan lately. Last I heard they were still camping near the border, some of them waiting for their asylum requests to be processed, and others trying to cross the border illegally.
THE LEGEND OF JARA CIMRMAN
by Talks With Beagles
During the Autumn of 1966, in the Czech village of Liptakov, Dr. Evzen Hedvabny was installing a new fireplace in an old country house that he owned. In the process of tearing out the old fireplace Hedvabny discovered a large trunk hidden within the wall. This trunk was stuffed full of old papers, which Hedvabny was certain had some historical value. Lacking the expertise needed to properly evaluate his find, he turned the whole business over to his friend Karel Velebny who lived in the capitol city of Prague.
Now Velebny was an aspiring playwrite who, upon opening the trunk for the first time, just knew that there must be a story in there somewhere. He assembled a group of his friends and, with their assistance, sorted out the papers and eventually pieced together the story of Jara Cimrman, who had lived in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Velebny and his associates were so inspired by the trove of information that had fallen into their hands that they formed a theatrical company and produced a series of plays based on Cimrman's life story. The first play was performed in 1967, and the company has been performing them regularly ever since to capacity crowds.
Now "Cimrman" is the Czech version of the German name "Zimmerman", which means a carpenter or a handyman. Jara Cimrman was certainly both of those things, but he was much more than that. He was a scientist, inventor, world traveler, explorer, philosopher, poet, educator, businessman, amateur dentist, amateur gynecologist, and many more things too numerous to mention here. A person like that is often called a "Renaisance man", and the ultimate Renaisance man was Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). It was natural, therefore, for rumors to circulate that Cimrman was somehow related to Leonardo. Serious Cimrmanologists never took these rumors seriously, however, until just recently, when a team of geneticists using DNA sequencing was able to determine that Jara Cimrman was indeed descended from Pietro Luciano da Vinci, who was the illegitimate son of Leonardo and his girlfriend Mona Lisa. Pietro left Italy at a young age and eventually ended up in England, where a mix-up at the immigration office changed his surname to "da Vincimrman". Pietro thought that this sounded a bit pretentious, so he shortened the family name to "Cimrman", which is what it has been ever since.
One of the most illustrious branches on the Cimrman family tree was Kevin Cimrman, whose most notable accomplishment was the invention of the fog engine. Living in 18th Century London at the time, Kevin noticed that there was a lot of fog going to waste, so he designed an engine that used fog as fuel. He managed to build a working prototype, but it had some bugs in it that needed to be worked out and Kevin was out of money, so he approached the London City Council in an an attempt to secure the necessary funding to perfect his invention. Kevin made the seemingly audacious claim that his engine could pull a streetcar faster than any horse, and in the trial run it certainly did, but only when traveling down hill. The City Council, lacking Kevin's creative vision, rejected the proposal out of hand. Kevin was so discouraged by this turn of events that he went home, set his invention on fire, and walked away from it. A moment later James Watt, who was a personal friend of Kevin's, came by to visit and was amazed to see the flaming engine moving under it's own power for the first time. Watt concluded that the heat of the flames had caused the fog in the chamber to expand and, by making a few minor alterations to Kevin's machine, subsequently came up with the steam engine. Kevin, having left the country destined for the North Pole, never received credit for his contribution to Watt's invention.
Little is known about Jara Cimrman's early years. He was born in Vienna, Austria to a Czech father and an Austrian mother, so according to the rules in force at the time, was a Czech citizen. The date of his birth is uncertain because the handwriting on his birth certificate is illegible, but it is generally believed that he was born sometime between 1850 and 1870. This would have made him somewhere between 10 and 30 years old when he served his brief apprenticeship with Thomas Edison. It was Cimrman who gave Edison the idea for the electric light bulb, but Edison quickly patented it under his own name, denying Cimrman the credit he rightly deserved. Disillusioned, Cimrman returned to his native Bohemia, a country to which he had never been before, and spent the next decade or so in contemplative introspection and vindictive brooding.
During this "lost period" Cimrman made a number of expeditions to the North Pole in search of his long lost ancestor Kevin. At the time, Kevin had journeyed to the Arctic to see if he could do something about global climate change. In those days there had been a series of unnaturally cold years which are referred to by historians as "The Little Ice Age." Kevin had concluded that this climate change was being caused by an excess quantity of ice in the polar regions. He figured that if he could somehow melt some of this ice the world would become warmer. Unfortunately, Kevin was never heard from again, so we don't know how far he got with his experiments. It is possible that Jara stumbled on the remnants of these experiments and re-initiated them, which would explain why we have global warming today. We may never know this for sure because Cimrman, being humble by nature, never claimed credit for any such thing.
By 1898 Cimrman had regained his optimism and secured a teaching position at a small school in rural Bavaria. While at this school he did some important research about the characteristics of light and darkness. Since the light bulb had already been invented, Cimrman resolved to invent the dark bulb, for people who needed to sleep in the daytime. While Cimrman never perfected the dark bulb, he did manage to come up with a dim bulb, and the name of Jara Cimrman has been associated with this device ever since.
One reason that Cimrman was unable to perfect the dark bulb was that, working with inadequate funding and volunteer student help, he was never able to precisely measure the speed of darkness. He was able to determine, however, that the speed of darklness is variable, unlike the speed of light which is absolute and constant. In the morning you see, darkness travels slower than light, allowing the light to over take the darkness, while in the evening, darkness travels faster than the speed of light, enabling the darkness to over take the light. You know many scientific discoveries had no practical use when they were first discovered, but years later somebody found a useful application for them. Who knows? Maybe it will happen to this one some day.
Always the innovator, Cimrman was the first person to successfully demonstrate the Big Bang Theory in the classroom. Ironically, this accomplishment resulted in the termination of his employment with the school. Apparently the superintendent, who had always been jealous of Cimrman's genius, was just looking for an excuse to get rid of him. No other explanation makes sense, since that school needed a new roof anyway.
By 1905 Cimrman had landed on his feet again and was operating a soda pop factory in the Ukraine. In this capacity he did a lot of work with what would later become computer technology. His greatest accomplishment in this field was the invention of the electric abacus, one of the earliest fore runners of the modern computer. Unfortunately, Cimrman was persuaded to abandon this project by his angry employees after the accidental electrocution of the popular abacus operator, due to an unexpected power surge during a lightning storm. Years later somebody got a hold of the abacus plans and incorporated them into the design of an electric chair, which was used to execute convicted criminals. As usual, Cimrman got none of the credit he deserved.
In 1910 Cimrman made the acquaintance of Albert Einstein, who was in Europe on a lecture tour, and they soon became drinking buddies. It was Cimrman who first suggested the Theory of Relativity to Einstein when he asserted that the reason they both kept falling off their bar stools was that there was a curve in the space-time continuum. In honor of Cimrman's contribution, Einstein began using the letter "c" to represent the speed of light in all his calculations. By some accounts, Einstein and Cimrman were reunited decades later in the States and collaborated on the development of the atomic bomb.
Cimrman was somewhat of a political activist, which was a dangerous activity to pursue in Hapsburg Europe. His most notable achievement in this field was the formulation of the Theory of the Fragmentation of Europe. Cimrman believed that the trouble with Europe was that many of its countries were too big, and were constantly trying to get bigger at their neighbor's expense. He proposed that these larger countries be broken up into smaller states the size of his native Bohemia. Then they would be too weak to pick on each other, so there would be peace in the land. Of course nobody listened to him, and look what happened! Two world wars, a cold war, and many other conflicts too numerous to mention. Cimrman's controversial opinions eventually got him into trouble with the authorities, and he was forced to hide out in the obscure village of Liptakov. One day in 1914 Cimrman took a stroll outside the village and mysteriously disappeared. There were occasional Cimrman sightings reported in various places around the world after that, but none of these reports could be reliably confirmed, and many people presumed him to be dead.
One of the more interesting of these unverified accounts describes how Cimrman, while sailing his squirrel-powered submarine in the Bermuda Triangle, was sucked into a time-space wormhole and transported to the moon, with the tragic loss of one of his crew members. While there, Cimrman was able to go for a brief walkabout on the Moon with the aid of a portable breathing device which he fashioned out of some empty beer bottles that he had on board. Moments after he returned to his submarine, the wormhole opened up again, delivering Cimrman, his craft, and his surviving crew members safely back to Earth. Cimrman probably dismissed this experience as a dream or hallucination because he never spoke of it to anybody. Of course Cimrman could not have known that, when the first astronauts reached the Moon decades later, they would find some mysterious footprints, a dead squirrel, and several empty beer bottles on the Lunar surface. This information was never released to the news media because the government hushed it up to prevent the Russians from finding out about it.
In 2005 a Czech television station conducted a poll to determine who was the greatest Czech of all time. Cimrman won by a large majority, but was disqualified because they said he was a fictional character. Cimrman's fans were outraged by this travesty and made a big uproar about it. They refused to believe that Cimrman was fictional and, even if he was, he was undoubtedly the smartest fictional character who never lived. Cimrman, you see, founded a school of philosophy known as "Externalism". An Externalist believes that he has no material existence and only exists in the perception of other people. Other philosophers of Cimrman's day scoffed at his hypothesis, but if it turns out that he really is fictional, then it just proves that Cimrman was right about Externalism. Now how many other fictional characters do you know of who are smart enough to recognize their own fictionality?
The big uproar about the television poll indirectly led to something called "The Cimrman Revival". It seems that some Russians scientists had recently discovered a human body frozen in the ice of Siberia. It was first believed to be a primitive proto-human species but, due to all the publicity generated by the TV contest, the Russians eventually recognized that it was, in fact, Jara Cimrman himself. Once they realized who they had, the Russians employed some secret experimental technology to bring Cimrman back to life. As soon as they had obtained all the information they could from him, the Russians spirited Cimrman away to Kathmandu, Nepal, and to this day the Russian government denies that the whole thing ever happened. (Those sneaky Russians!)
Cimrman was known to correspond with several people by e-mail while he was in Katmandu. They report that he was really excited about the internet because he had finally found something capable of holding all of his accumulated knowledge. In his former lifetime, Cimrman had devised something like the internet, using a network of pneumatic pipes to transmit written messages and small packages to distant locations. He once tried to relieve a famine in Slovakia by sending sausages, which were plentiful in Bohemia, to the stricken area. Unfortunately the sausages did not travel well and arrived at their destination in a somewhat altered condition. The ungrateful Slovaks called this stuff "spam", which meant "worthless crap" in the local vernacular of the time. Cimrman insisted that the spam tasted better than it looked and eventually sold the idea to an American meat packing company. The internet spam of today was in fact named in honor of Cimrman's contribution to international harmony. (The report blaming the spam incident for the subsequent withdrawal of Slovakia from the Czechoslovakian union is of dubious authenticity and will not be repeated here.)
After spending a year or so in Kathmandu, Cimrman mysteriously vanished again and has not been seen since. Soon after that, some of the Cimrman texts, which had been published on the internet only in the Czech language, began to spontaneously translate themselves into English. At first this was believed to be the work of a mutant virus gone wild, but it soon became evident that Cimrman had somehow managed to transfer his consciousness to the internet, where he could theoretically live forever. (Of course there was more evidence than that, but I am not at liberty to divulge its nature, or even to tell you why I can't tell you.) Suffice it to say that we can take comfort in the knowledge that Jara Cimrman is alive and well on the internet, and that he will continue indefinitely his eternal quest for truth and excellence.TWB
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